by MANDY DE WAAL
Professor Phillip Tobias with a collection of fossil hominid skulls from east and southern Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. PHOTO/Chris Kirchhoff/MediaClubSA
Johannesburg — A man with a twinkle in his eye, who lived for his science and his students, the man who bravely fought the apartheid machine, has died. What lives on is his remarkable legacy in the fields of palaeoanthropology, genetics, medicine and humanitarianism.
It is hard to think of Emeritus Professor Phillip Valentine Tobias as dead. He was a man who was so brilliantly alive. Two years ago, when he was 85, Tobias spoke to Sunday Times about death: “Retirement is the kiss of death. I still come to the office most days, but as you can see there’s no computer on my desk. I officially retired from my chair of anatomy after 30 years at the end of 1990, then immediately took up another three years – and then retired in the sense that they no longer paid me.”
But during the last few months of his life, Tobias battled with ill health and finally succumbed in hospital at midday on Thursday. He was revered around the world. Tobias completed a medical BSc and lectured at Wits Medical School before getting his doctorates in medicine, palaeoanthropology and genetics. An honorary doctorate at Cambridge University followed, and in 1959 he became head of anatomy at the Wits medical school. He succeeded his friend, mentor and teacher Raymond Dart, who earned fame for discovering the “Taung” skull, a species he claimed to be an evolutionary “bridge” between apes and humans. Tobias studied genetics with Dart, who cultivated in his student a great love of palaeoanthropology. But the man, who was to become one the world’s most respected experts on human evolution, first started thinking about humans’ ancestors as a child who loved to read comic books.
The Chicago Tribune tells of how Tobias was engrossed by cave-man comics that portrayed Neanderthals as stooped brutes. “They had the spark divine in their heads, but they were bent over in appallingly bad posture,” Tobias told the Tribune. “That was the view then, that we became human in our brains before we became human in our posture and our teeth,” said the octogenarian who saw many paradigms in the study of ancient humans overturned during his time. “We have to swallow hard and open our minds – I’ve always loved changes of paradigm, and we are living on the brink of big ones at this moment. I’m very excited. I don’t think we’re 50% of the way toward resolving the outstanding questions of human origins,” said Tobias before warning that not being open to new ideas in his field could lead to rapid “cerebral fossilisation”.
Though Tobias is legendary for unearthing man’s ancient ancestry, back home it was his huge regard for humanity and his active struggle against Apartheid that made him a true son of the South African soil. Born in Durban on 14 October 1925, Tobias moved to Johannesburg to study science and medicine at Wits University a few years before the dark shroud of apartheid started to become a legislated evil. “Only a few years after I arrived here, the Apartheid regime came to power under DF Malan and they won that fateful election on an Apartheid platform. Every branch of society was to be segregated. Discrimination was to be enforced between the haves and the have-nots, between black and white South Africans,” Tobias said when he received the Walter Sisulu Special Contribution Award in 2007.
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